When communicating digital information from one point to another, prior art practitioners frequently encode that digital information to support a variety of purposes, including error correction. Convolutional encoding comprises one general form of particularly successful encoding technique. Unfortunately, convolutional codes do suffer from at least one disadvantage; they have no inherent error detection capability.
Prior art solutions to circumvent the above typically provide for concatenating the code with a cyclic redundancy check code. This solution unfortunately, allocates some of the fixed number of error control bits for error detection, thereby reducing the number of bits that remain for error correction.
Accordingly, a need exists for a method that can provide error detection capability when using convolutional codes without using an explicit error detection code, thereby allowing more bits to be utilized for improving error correction capacity.